Principles of Government Corrupted

Taking grandpa’s advice in regards to the principles of government, I began to research it further along the lines of what he said. I began by looking up the Articles of Confederation. As I was reading it, I realized what grandpa was trying to teach me that there was more in regards to the founding principles of government as our founding fathers saw it. With the reading of it, I began to write down the ideas I saw in it.

The first thing I noticed was the fact that government was still to play the same role as they always had. That is, the role of ruling over the people and that its role was never to be the servant of the people as some would like to claim. It is by fulfilling this singular role that governments serve the people best.

The next thing I noticed was the fact that they remained true to the concept of no taxation without representation. Only the states were represented in this new form of government. The states were to provide for the financial needs of this body of government not the people themselves.

In reading this document it became clear to me that it was the states not the people who created this federal government. It was the states that our founding fathers were representing not the people as some would have us believe. It also led me to the understanding, which grandpa confirmed, that the word people as used in our present Constitution had a double meaning.

We must remember one thing as grandpa was implying. Government is not an intangible entity of societies. Government is a very living entity. Government only has power and it can only be seen as a ruler of the people in terms of the people who are in the office of power. People rule over people and it is people who are ruled. It is only in this understanding that we can understand the need of government to be an entity of checks and balances. People are the ones that are corrupted by power not government per se.

People now days see government as the servant of the people. We can see this in the promises of politicians who seek to be elected to office. We can see it in the programs that those elected politicians have created. We can see it in the length of time that some politicians serve in office because of those promises.

One last thing I have learned from reading the Articles of Confederation. It was the fact that our founding fathers understood very well the corruptive nature of the power of government and its ability to abuse that power to rule over the people. We can see that they attempted to check that power by giving the people a means to control government.

What they could not have foresaw was the fact that the people would seize upon this newly acquired power and create an ideology that declares that all power is in the hands of the people. In other words, the people have been corrupted by the little power they were given. In some, that corruption is absolute.

The Articles of Confederation was this nation’s first Constitution and the Constitution we possess now was intended to create a more perfect union. It was intended to guarantee that the federal government was the subordinate government to the state governments. Constitutionally it still is but as we can see, in reality, it has become the dominant power.

The states and people have become dependent upon the federal government. This could only have resulted from a corrupt understanding and interpretation of our Constitution. This could only have happened by the possession of an ideology that was not consistent with the ideas behind the creation of the form of government that we were given.

Grandpa says that, in time, it will be the downfall of this nation also. Our first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, is a document that very few people think of when thinking of this nation’s beginning. Yet, it reveals more of the thinking of what this country was meant to be than any other document. It was flawed yes, but the principles remained in the new Constitution. But those principles have been corrupted. Some politicians seek to corrupt them even more as seen by the promises they are making.

A tear fell down my cheek as I reread the beauty that was contained in the minds of those that founded this nation, a beauty lost by the greed of men.